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Friday, March 13, 2009

Geography Fair

"Zdrastvuytye!" (Russian for Hello!)

We had a fun time participating in a Geography Fair last night along with 12 other families. We chose Russia as our country to study and put together a display board and gathered Russian items. My great-grandparents immigrated to America from Russia and so my Mom has some items from them. I was reminded of the story that my great-grandfather was not allowed to sail at first because of an eye condition and so my great-grandmother ended up sailing to America with four little girls and was pregnant at the time. I cannot even imagine that!

The boys favorite building was St. Basil's cathedral, a most colorful building indeed and they each traced and colored a picture of it. We read a number of children's fiction set in Russia and learned to count to ten and say a few words. I found some Russian recipes as we each brought food from our country as well. I must say that their cuisine is not very appealing to me. While I do enjoy beets I did not want to bring beets or cabbage which I know are very common. I ended up making some sweet rye biscuits called Lepeshki that my boys gobbled up. We also served Pierogies (also called Pelmeni in Russia) along with black tea that they put a type of jelly called Varenia in (something my grandma used to do).

We had hoped to dress up but I didn't have a chance to find costumes for the boys. I had scarves that a girl could wear but nothing for boys. Instead I made name tags for each of them with the Russian variation of each of their names. So we had -- Naum (Nay-um), Luka, Jann (Yah-nn), Foma (Fow-ma), and Katerina.

What a great opportunity to learn about various countries in a short amount of time and of course the food was a favorite! George and I especially enjoyed the daikon radishes from Japan and the food from Mexico! Yum!

We hope to do this again next year this time studying states.

Here are Naum, Luka, and Jann -- Foma and Katerina were off playing and Baby boy was looking for food :)

Our display table

Our display board. Highlighted in blue are the names of my Great-Grandmother and her daughters on the list of "aliens" sailing on the Lusitania.

We also had a dish of sunflower seeds as we learned that Russia grows more sunflowers than any other country and they have seeds out in a bowl as we would have candy in a bowl. You can see Baby Boy behind the table.